Now How Much Will You Pay? But Wait!

Beset with huge losses attributable to high costs and low fares, the airline industry now has something else to worry about: the aging insulation on some aircraft.

As ANN reported last year, the issue is strongly linked to the destruction of Swiss Air 111, a McDonnell Douglas MD-11 that went down in the ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1998. A complicated Canadian Transport Board investigation showed the aircraft's inflight entertainment network ignited a fire in the aircraft's insulation just above the cockpit, filling the flight deck with toxic smoke and eventually leading to the aircraft's demise.

The TSB found:

"Reconstruction of the wreckage indicated that a segment of arced electrical cable associated with the in-flight entertainment network (IFEN) had been located in the area where the fire most likely originated. The Board concluded that the arc on this electrical cable was likely associated with the fire initiation event. The Board also concluded that it is likely that one or more additional wires were involved in the lead arcing event, and that the additional wire or wires could have been either IFEN or aircraft wires. Therefore, it could not be concluded that the known arcing event on the IFEN cable located in the area where the fire most likely originated was by itself the lead event."

Based in part on that finding, the NTSB in Washington has ordered the metalized Mylar insulation replaced on all MD-80, MD-88, MD-90, DC-10 and MD-11 aircraft by June 30th. The FAA estimates cost of retrofitting the 719 aircraft that fall under the mandate at $368.4 million.

"Any expense right now is bad timing for airlines, since most of them are in a cash crunch," Calyon Securities analyst Ray Neidl told Reuters. "But safety comes first."

FMI: www.ntsb.gov